Fix Him!

charlotte Lucas

He opened the window to look at his backyard with an air of arrogance. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the movement, the curtsying out like a brisk wind in the morning, but Sheldon did it ever so slightly with pride for his accomplishment of moving the panel. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, and he wasn’t anything to be proud of either. He stood at about 5 foot 10 but demanded that every person he met agree he was 6 foot 2, had long piano fingers that dashed along the edges of every windowsill, railing, and coffee table, and was born on a full moon. If he had been born handsome his behavior would be a different story, but the problem was that he truly thought he was so attractive. When girls told him that he looked like a dog, he assumed it was one of those fancy poodles that looked like it had been deeply traumatized. He walked around the house like he owned all of it, the lush coaches, the curtains, the gold plates. Unfortunately, he would one day. 

In front of Sheldon was the back lawn. His parents had employed some college students to fill the backyard up with balloons for a work event. His father’s company’s executive board told him that there were numerous complaints about a toxic work environment, so he decided to invite average workers employed at the Los Angeles office for dinner. It was such a drag when they told Sheldon at dinner. He crumpled into a napkin and held his hands over his ears. He despaired into the diamond chandelier. He wailed and asked over and over again why they couldn’t have been old money. His father had only invented a lesser known version of the Xbox, he said, and their house was so minimalistic that other elites would look down on them and see them as faux. 

Two college students carried a table across the lawn to an area that sunlight hit at all times of the day. They were like mindless little bugs who had no idea they were living horrible lives. He sighed and watched the day more intensely. The sunlight fell over the rose bushes in waves, so dramatically that the rays almost paused its movement in each of his breaths. It had a weight to it over each flower, the lovely, dangerous little things. 

“Sheldon, honey!” his mother called from behind him. 

He turned around to see her. She was dressed in a long black dress that didn’t do her any justice. It made her shoulders look too wide with the v-cut and her hair became overly thick next to her delicate features. 

“Mommy?” he asked. 

She stepped closer to him. She was taller in her heels. 

“Go to your room and get ready for dinner, honey. Your father wants everything to be prepared for our guests.”

“I don’t like company,” he said, putting his head down. 

His mom rubbed her hand through his hair, and replied, “I know, I know. You can tell me which outfit you want to buy tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

She kissed his head, saying “You are my world.”

The two parted. There weren't many more outfits for Sheldon to choose from. He’d already collected most of the summer lines from every designer brand. The last time this happened, he got a black androgynous suit because he talked to an investor for thirty minutes while his father got his haircut. There weren't many other options for him to choose from. When the suit arrived, he sat alone in his room and rubbed his fingers over the material, waiting to feel static electricity. 

Sheldon quickly agreed with his mother’s plan and began walking across the tile floor to his bedroom. He was smooth talking, smooth walking like Michael Jackson across it. He realized that the tiles were the thing he loved most about the house. They were flat and tough, so tough they came from stone and were expensive and shiny. The tile never went out of fashion since the 1800s and it would surely hurt people’s knees to clean on. He thought that one of the college students should’ve been scrubbing them right now, but presumably, no one had thought about cleaning things like that like he did. 

In his bedroom, he lollygagged about, tossing and turning between the sheets. When he mustered up the courage, he tried on several outfits and strutted in front of his mirror. At times like these, he wished that he could have cleavage to take a selfie of and look at later. Instead, he could only twist his shoulders back and forth, back and forth, in front of the mirror like a sexy witch in Brooklyn casting a spell to brew kombucha. It was all very unnecessary, but, once it was stripped of its eccentricity, and the blood vessels popping in his head, it was desperation confounded with boredom. It could only be that. When it got boring again, he ultimately decided on the androgynous suit when nothing else sparked his eye. 

Then, he went downstairs and outdoors to dinner.

People were mingling. A few were under a group of hanging lanterns, holding glasses of champagne, the most elderly folk were sitting in chairs with pillows behind them, and the businessman, including his father, sat hunched around the outside coffee table. A few whispered into their Bluetooth headsets to take another meeting or deal with an issue at the office that hadn’t been resolved. But Sheldon saw his daddy and went over to him immediately. 

“Daddy,” he said. 

“My boy,” he replied, “you look just as handsome as ever.”

“Thank you, daddy.” 

His father gestured to the businessmen around him. “We were just discussing how grown you are now. You have such a strength to you, a set of leadership skills that could be used at the office downtown.”

One of the businessmen nodded in agreement, and agreed, “Yes, you would be a very good symbol for us to use as an extension of the family business to a younger generation.”

Sheldon felt betrayed. They wanted him to get up in the morning and go somewhere each day, commute? It was all very preposterous. He wondered if this was how Jesus felt when he realized that one of his friends would betray him. He thought that these men had been his friends. Cornelius, the old man with a large stomach and circular scars on his shoulders from the time a stripper tried to kill him, had done science experiments with him when he was younger. They made a volcano. And now? They would imprison him with the torture of monotony, waking each morning and experiencing the same thing over and over again, sitting in an office chair and doing mindless tasks. 

Before he could freak out, his father asked, “Why don’t you get us some shrimp, my boy”

Sheldon flounced his hair, turned around swiftly, and went to the food table. 

The college students had decorated it fairly nicely. There was maroon cloth draped across it, and silver flowers were placed down on each corner. The food was held in dark, wooden bowls that he and his parents had bought in Switzerland while they were there for Thanksgiving years ago. He touched one of them. It was much smoother than he imagined. Inside of that one were cheese crisps, freshly made by their chef this morning. 

He walked down to the platter with shrimp. Realizing he was without a plate, he turned to the woman next to him and asked where they were. 

“Where are the plates,” he asked. 

Her eyebrows flounced up a little bit. She said, “In front of your hands.”

They were directly in front of his hands. How embarrassing. He grabbed one of them. 

“Are you Sheldon?” she asked. 

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

“Who are you?”

“Aubrey.”

Aubrey. What a luxurious name.

“I want to meet your dad,” she said.

He studied her for a moment. She had reddish hair in the lighting, but he wasn’t sure if it would be burgundy in the daylight. Maybe it had been dyed red on a whim to feel like a cool artsy person, and then she felt insecure about it and immediately dyed it back to brown when she had the chance. At that point, she had a playlist with only “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers on it and taped a poster of The Virgin Suicides on her wall. She thought no one else knew about these things. There was some red left in her hair despite all the washing. It was thin and swept down past her shoulders. Her dress was dark blue, fairly cheap, an indicator that her parents didn’t have an important job at the company. They probably only worked the telephones or put mail into boxes. 

He thought this would be fun. After a moment, he invited her to go with him. 

He piled shrimp high onto the plate that he got, added the necessary silverware, and dropped a dollop of sauce on the side. They walked together, at first a little awkwardly, and it remained that way for a time. Neither was quite sure how to rest their shoulders next to the other. It wasn’t clear if they should hold them high, or a little tense, rigid, like there was a totem pole going from one end of their collarbones to the other. Because of that, they also didn’t know what to do with their hands. Sheldon didn’t have as much of an issue with this because of his plate, but he watched every now and then, out of the corner of his eye, Aubrey makes little punching motions like she was in a video game. She punched out in front of her as they made their way back to the businessmen. The secondhand embarrassment didn’t hit her from the outside, he saw, but it hit him.

The conversation between all of them was disappointingly okay at first. With his father and Aubrey and all of the rest of the businessmen, they made simple pleasantries for each other. Aubrey sat correctly at her seat, with her legs crossed beneath each other and her hands placed in her lap. There were a few lulls in conversation when someone would bend forward, take a shrimp with a little fork, and chew on it, but otherwise, they noted everything from celebrity news, food in town, and the congested traffic.

As the night was ending, and most people had already left, Sheldon, Aubrey, and his father sat on the couches alone. 

Aubrey leaned forward, “You know what I’ve been thinking about,” she said, “how your house alone burns enough fuel to kill a small planet.”

It was beautiful, all the words colliding before Sheldon in a beautiful disaster and in slow motion and with a fury in his heart like never before. There has only ever been one time in his life that Sheldon has felt insecure. It was in second grade when this fifth-grade girl with wrangled teeth, ugly acne, and an overbite decided that she would torture him. She was mid-puberty, stocky, and taller than all the rest of her classmates. To some, she seemed like an overconfident librarian. But she looked like the type of girl who would fight back if a homeless man started to come at her. Every day she gave Sheldon that look of despise, and when he went home to his bedroom, looked around, he felt small inside of it. 

That went on until he remembered he was a yellow belt in karate and feet sweeped her while she was walking to music class. At that moment, he felt like he could control everyone in the world. Sheldon wanted more from Aubrey, he wanted the fire and the flames and more. 

Sheldon’s father said, “And what do you know about that?”

Aubrey smirked, “I know that you are the worst type of person to exist in the world. Nothing you say or do is honest or worth anyone’s space or time. Do you think that you deserve to occupy space, you fatass? You think you deserve multiple acres, not one, multiple acres. Do you look around at everything you have and just feel so in love with yourself and you love shoving your face with cheese and shrimp. Do you masturbate in your king-size bed in pure bliss? The world is ending. The world is over, it’s in flames and there’s nothing left to be happy for because of people like you. I wish the world was like what it was in the sixties when we weren’t afraid to shoot up some politicians.”

Sheldon’s father leaned forward, “Oh, really? How are you going to kill me?”

“Bullet through the eyes.”

“Of course,” he replied.

The sound of someone stomping came. They all looked over. It was Sheldon’s mother walking across the lawn, a champagne glass in hand and no shoes on.

“Oh, I’ve been looking for you all everywhere, but I got all twisted around in this place,” she wheezed out. 

Somehow, she made it to Sheldon and placed her hand on his shoulder. Half for support, half to pretend that she loved him. 

“Did your father tell you that you’re going to be working in the Los Angeles office?”

“Mommy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I’m not going to do that.”

Aubrey slammed her hand down on the table, “Yes, Sheldon. Don’t you see, you have to grasp the power with your two hands. These people,” she pointed at them, “want to put you at the office because the last guy that was there and in charge was caught fiddling with kids. What better way to restore their reputation with the Xbox community than by instilling their well-raised, moral son as the head?”

Sheldon’s mother shook her head, “You’re a crabapple.”

Aubrey and Sheldon’s parents began to fight. While they did so, Sheldon looked back and forth at them. Aubrey was so beautiful, he thought, she had this anger and righteousness that unwound in every moment. He could imagine her walking down a hiking trail, wearing a loose fitting shirt, yoga pants covered in dog fur, and letting her hair roll out into the wind, unwashed, being confident. She wouldn’t care. Just being filthy and disgusting meant that she was one with nature. She was happiest, he thought, when she’d been in bed for three days, with crumbs all over her, unshowered. Even now, all made up, she was raw. He liked the way she pointed her finger at people, it was unyielding, so arrogant. 

Something about her, even though he couldn’t put his finger on it, made his heart putter for a moment. There was no reason that he should care for her. She was the ocean tide pulling through. Sheldon had never been surfing, but he thought that talking with her was close to the sensation of trying to control water. You move back and forth on the board, communicate with the tide, but still don’t expect the water to give you any traction. 

All those times that his parents hadn’t shown up for anything. He sat at school for so many hours after it ended because they had forgotten to hire a new nanny after their Russian one was mysteriously paid to leave. He ate dinner alone most nights because his parents were out at another movie and didn’t want to take him with them. Sometimes they went on trips around the world, and yet they never took him to see the Pacific Ocean. It was too close to home. He’d never seen an ocean before. He got the lead role in Seussical: The Musical in freshman year, and looked around the auditorium, in all that makeup, just to see that there was no one there to see him. 

Though it was crazy, he could imagine their entire future together. Her with her artsy movies and resting smirk face. Him with his pain. Somehow, over time, they would build a home together, and he could finally show his heart again after breathing cautiously for years. He knew she could fix him. Whether it was then or now, it would happen. He would stop lashing out at people below him. He would, too, enjoy being poor. 

“Get out of my house, you Jezebel!” Sheldon’s father yelled. 

Sheldon’s mother had run away with her glass of champagne. Aubrey had been so cruel, and she got off on it. She called Sheldon’s mother a botoxed bimbo who pretended to be an idiot to keep her husband. Sheldon’s mother ran up the deck stairs on all fours like a drunk spider.

“Out of my house!” Sheldon’s father repeated.

Aubrey conceded.

Sheldon stood up and began walking her to her car. He swaggered back and forth in a cool way that wasn’t at all sexually forthcoming. His confidence, he thought, would make him so attractive. A few times, he opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was little wisps of air before he gave up and caught his own throat. 

They walked the path that the college students had come through. The second backdoor! Sheldon opened the side gate like a gentleman and nodded to himself for being a feminist. Aubrey very politely said thank you and they continued walking. Part of him was waiting for her to send a signal. He loved it when girls did that. Sometimes they gave those I-hate-you-I-love-you eyes, but other times, and sometimes they slapped him when they’d had too many shots of fireball. Either way, they were fierce. 

“So what do your parents do?” he asked. 

“My parents?”

“Yeah, what do they do?”

“They work in environmental law.”

Sheldon titled his head.

Aubrey continued, “I’m a marketing associate at your father’s company.”

All of a sudden she was so much sexier. 

Sheldon asked, “So do you like doing that stuff?”

“Not at all it makes me feel like a balding pervert.”

“Do you like surfing?”

“You are so weird.”

“How about making love?”

They got to her car. It was a beat-up Toyota with pro-abortion stickers on it. 

“You know,” she said, “you’re going to think for a long time that people don’t like you because your parents are low-key abusive, neglect you, and you’re so disconnected from reality because you’re rich. When, really, it’s just because you have a weird personality. Your face looks like you’re going to go crazy one day and become an ax murderer. That’s why no one likes you, Sheldon.”

She grabbed her door handle and opened the car door. 

Sheldon put his hand against the hood, leaning against it. He got close to her face. 

“I’m 6 foot 2,” he whispered.

“No the fuck you’re not,” she whispered back. 

The car door slammed shut. 

Sheldon looked out in the distance like Oscar Wilde. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be oppressed. It was so dismal. The dark night hung over them like a blanket, a sheet, a feeling wrapping all around him with its arms. He felt like a human. It was too much. He began shaking his head. Thank god he had been born rich, he realized. Those broke college students were probably out stealing peanuts from gas stations and taking donations from churches. He couldn’t believe that he ever wanted to take Aubrey as his woman. People like her deserved to be dumpster diving at the restaurants he ate at.

He began laughing and called, “Daddy, I’ll take the job!”

Charlotte Lucas is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy from Maryland. She has been published in Crashtest, the DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing 2023, and The Interlochen Review. When she’s not writing, she enjoys playing with her golden retriever and watching 90’s sitcoms.